New Rig

Until earlier this week, the system I worked on (and recorded all the tutorials) was pretty miserable. Running on an old 2.4GHz QuadCore processor (Q6600) with 4GB of RAM and dual nVidia 8800GTS SLI cards have been fun two years ago, but as the demands of operating systems and software increased I found myself spending too much time on waiting, and too less on creating. Most of the work done in PAL standard was still OK, but all the projects mastered in HD were bringing my old compy to its knees.

This is the first post written from my new system, custom built by a friend of mine (who would have thought World of Warcraft was such a networking opportunity :). It’s a monster (the PC, not the friend).

I am still finishing up several projects, and the computer is not fully installed, but I can already see my productivity increase incredibly. To give you an example, the monstrosity mentioned in the previous post took over 17 hours to render on my old machine. The new system did it in 1 hour, 20 minutes. Full specs after the break.

• CPU: intel 980X, 3.33GHz, 12 Cores
• RAM: 24 GB
• Video: nVidia 480 GTX
• Disks: 240 SSD for system and programs + 2TB of mirrored RAID array for files
• Monitors: 2x Samsung 2370XL (1080p) – quite an upgrade from old CRTs I worked on before

All that sits inside an awesome Cooler Master Cosmos case with custom coolers for both CPU and GPU. It’s also quiet as a whisper. (My old system was more reminiscent of a vacuum cleaner).